New York co-founder Milton Glaser remade the world of design
IF THERE'RE TALENTED AND THEY 'RE LUCKY, designer-artist-creators get to lob an icon out into the f larger they’re culture—the talented ultra-familiar and they’re shape lucky, of Leo Fender’s Stratocaster guitar, say, or Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster. If they’re great, maybe they create two. Milton Glaser, though, operated on another plane—he just kept hitting the bull’s-eye, again and again, throughout his seven decades as an illustrator, graphic designer, art director, and visual philosopher and paterfamilias. He loved New York City and celebrated it in multiple ways: with a magazine, with posters, and (most visibly of all) with the three-letters-and-a-red-heart slogan he created. Almost incidentally, he also changed the way you eat.
Milton Glaser died on June 26, his 91st birthday, of natural causes after an extremely long and productive career. Around our office, of course, he will forever be recalled as one of the small team of men and women who, in the late ’60s, yanked New York out of the newspaper morgue and turned it into a great American magazine. In 1966, the Esquire alumnus Clay Felker had been editing the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune—which was called New York—when the paper shut down. It came back for a few months at a merged entity called the World Journal Tribune, until that paper also crashed and burned. Over the next year, Felker and Glaser devised a plan to reincarnate it on its own, as a weekly glossy magazine, using the best and most inventive writers from the Trib and Esquire and various other places. It was a near-starvation operation when they launched it in the first week of April 1968, and it was also a hit. New York soon became the hottest and liveliest magazine in America, in large part because Glaser’s design was crisp and understated and bright and poppy. He drew the logo that’s on the cover of this issue, which has been tweaked over the years but is fundamentally the same one that appeared on Vol. 1, No. 1 (and also on the really wonderful poster, shown on page 12, that he drew for the launch).
If you met him, you were probably struck by his voice, which was deep and chesty, simultaneously aristocratic and grounded, elevated in tone but capable of operating at street level. With his distinctive and gradually graying beard, he served as the cerebral, vaguely rabbinical foil to Felker, who could be, for all his better qualities, a shouty and mercurial boss. Felker would yell, Glaser would rumble back, and something good usually came of it. Their employees nicknamed them the Twin Towers.
Unlike Felker, he’d been a New Yorker from the beginning. Born in the Bronx in 1929, he was a public-school kid of the stickball generation, the son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. After graduating from Cooper Union, Glaser first made a splash as part of a small confederation of illustrators called Push Pin Studios. There, along with his friends Seymour Chwast, Edward Sorel, and Reynold Ruffins—Chwast drew the portrait you see on the opposite page here—they were at the leading edge of their field, as the taste in illustration for magazines and ads changed from a brushy, painting-driven realism to a curvy, bright, cartoony approach. Maybe it was because they had come of age with comic books; maybe it was just more purely American, New York–y, ethnic, what have you. If Glaser had a breakout moment, it was his poster of Bob Dylan from 1966. It was commissioned by CBS Records, and a folded copy was slipped into the jacket of every LP of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, from which it was then removed and tacked up in seemingly every dorm room in America. It looked fresh and modern, but it was also art-history literate: Glaser had borrowed the silhouette profile from a self-portrait of Marcel Duchamp (a lift that he readily admitted to). Even the typeface was his own, a font called Baby Teeth. MoMA owns a copy of the poster, and Glaser’s studio still sells reprints of it. The Push Pin aesthetic (not to mention its talent roster) is on full view in the early issues of New York, partly because Glaser did so very much work in its pages. He was always prolific, but never more so than he was then, because the start-up magazine was continually scrambling. If he and Felker didn’t have a cover 24 hours before going to press, Glaser would just sit down and draw one. You can go through those illustrations in several of his books— notably Mag Men, the collection Walter Bernard and Glaser published last year—and you should consider, as you do, how fresh those bright fields of color and psychedelic forms looked around 1970. “Speed City”—that snake, with its biblical implications as well as its venomous ones, suggests invitation along with menace. So does the “Gossip” demon. And who else would turn an old Jewish joke—the one that ends, “Of course he can walk. Thank God, he doesn’t have to”—into a magazine cover?
He wrote, too. Starting in those first issues in the Herald Tribune, Glaser and his friend Jerome Snyder, the design director of Sports Illustrated, created “The Underground Gourmet,” becoming very possibly the world’s first columnists covering cheap ethnic dining in a sophisticated way. That sounds like no big deal now, but it was an eye-opener in 1968. As Glaser explained it, nobody had bothered to cover restaurants outside the white-tablecloth world, because they didn’t advertise. But, as hard-core New Yorkers, Glaser and Snyder knew that a whole lot of us love nothing more than a great Chinatown dumpling joint, or a superior taco stand, or a scoop of perfect whitefish salad, or a bowl of udon. He brought all of those and more to New York’s early readership, and everyone—from the New York Times on down—followed. Vernacular rather than dressy food is today the dominant restaurant experience in New York, not to mention the dominant subject of restaurant coverage, and a major branch of its family tree starts with Glaser and Snyder.
In 1977, he got the one job that would end up even more widely seen than the Dylan poster and the magazine. After the city’s fiscal crisis of 1975, New York State was pushing tourism with a big ad buy and a jingle. Glaser already had the job—he’d presented a proposal to the executives that they liked—when he came up with a better idea in the New York–iest place on Earth: the back seat of a yellow cab. (Walk? Thank God, he didn’t have to.) It was just four characters, scribbled in red crayon on a torn envelope: i ny. It was just off-kilter enough—you tend to read it as “I Heart Enn Wye” on the first try—to be exactly right. A billion coffee mugs and T-shirts followed. Because it was designed for the city he loved and a campaign that seemed temporary, Glaser did it pro bono, and he seems to have enjoyed its endless permutations, parodies, and rip-offs. The torn envelope from the taxi ride is also in the permanent collection of MoMA. He even drew a sequel after the 9/11 attacks, reading i ♥ny more than ever, in which the heart’s lower-left-hand edge is singed just as lower Manhattan was.
Glaser and Felker lost control of New York to Rupert Murdoch at the beginning of 1977. They quit immediately (as did much of the staff), and Glaser went back to doing design work full time. There was a ton of it, from more posters—there are hundreds of them for concerts, museum shows, social movements—to branding for Grand Union supermarkets to, yes, a Trump Vodka bottle. He even worked up a playful apple-tree logo for P.S. 116, the grade school next door to his studio, and you can see it rendered in steel on the schoolyard fence.
And in those years, he made still another prescient call. In the mid-1980s, Steve Hindy and Tom Potter, the founders of a new microbrewery, came to him for a logo design. Glaser took a look at their proposed name—Brooklyn Eagle, recalling the defunct newspaper—and, as he told the story, he offered one key bit of advice. “Anheuser-Busch already has the eagle,” he told them. “You’ve got Brooklyn. That’s enough!” Brooklyn Brewery, with its swooping baseball-jersey logo evoking both the departed Dodgers and a swirl of beer foam, made its debut in 1988. Because the company was a start-up without much money, Glaser took a 5 percent stake instead of a fee. Today, Brooklyn Brewery is a huge global brand—and, as Glaser told me a couple of years ago, that was the thing that made him financially independent, enough to keep him in taxicabs and then some, enthusiastically sketching, for the rest of his life. “Of all the work I’ve done!” he said, chuckling, in that inimitable voice. ■